How often do you come in contact with a conspiracy theory?
Maybe on occasion, when you flip through TV channels and land on an episode of “Ancient Aliens.” Or perhaps when a friend from high school shares a questionable meme on Facebook.
How confident are you in your ability to tell fact from fiction?
If you’re a teen, you could be exposed to conspiracy theories and a host of other pieces of misinformation as frequently as every day while scrolling through your social media feeds.
That’s according to a new study by the News Literacy Project, which also found that teens struggle with identifying false information online. This comes at a time when media literacy education isn’t available to most students, the report finds, and their ability to distinguish between objective and biased information sources is weak. The findings are based on responses from more than 1,000 teens ages 13 to 18.
“News literacy is fundamental to preparing students to become active, critically thinking members of our civic life — which should be one of the primary goals of a public education,” Kim Bowman, News Literacy Project senior research manager and author of the report, said in an email interview. “If we don’t teach young people the skills they need to evaluate information, they will be left at a civic and personal disadvantage their entire lives. News literacy instruction is as important as core subjects like reading and math.”
Telling Fact from Fiction
About 80 percent of teens who use social media say they see content about conspiracy theories in their online feeds, with 20 percent seeing conspiracy content every day.
“They include narratives such as the Earth being flat, the 2020 election being rigged or stolen, and COVID-19 vaccines being dangerous,” the News Literacy Project’s report found.
While teens don’t believe every conspiracy theory they see, 81 percent who see such content online said they believe one or more.
Bowman noted, “As dangerous or harmful as they can be, these narratives are designed to be engaging and satisfy deep psychological needs, such as the need for community and understanding. Being a conspiracy theorist or believing in a conspiracy theory can become a part of someone’s identity. It’s not necessarily a label an individual is going to shy away from sharing with others.”
At the same time, the report found that the bar for offering media literacy is low. Just six states have guidelines for how to teach media literacy, and only three make it a requirement in public schools.
Less than 40 percent of teens surveyed reported having any media literacy instruction during the 2023-24 school year, according to the analysis.
Credible Sources
As part of gathering data for the report, teens were asked to try their hand at distinguishing between different types of information they might encounter online. They were also challenged to identify real or fake photos and judge whether an information source is credible.
The study asked participants to identify a series of articles as advertisements, opinion or news pieces.
More than half of teens failed to identify branded content — a newsy-looking piece on plant-based meat in the Washington Post news app — as an advertisement. About the same amount didn’t realize that an article with “commentary” in the headline was about the author’s opinion.
They did better at recognizing Google’s “sponsored” results as ads, but about 40 percent of teens said they thought it meant those results were popular or of high quality. Only 18 percent of teens correctly categorized the information in all three examples.
In another exercise, teens were asked to identify which of two pieces of content about Coca-Cola’s plastic waste was more credible: a press release from Coca-Cola or an article from Reuters. The results were too close for comfort for the report, with only 56 percent of teens choosing the Reuters article as more trustworthy.
Brand recognition could have played a role in teens’ decision to choose Coca-Cola over Reuters, Bowman says, a feeling that a more-recognizable company was more credible.
“Whatever the reason, I do think news organizations engaging young people on social media and building up trust and recognition there could have the potential to move the needle on a question like this in the future,” Bowman said.
Checking the Facts
Where teens did feel confident spotting hoaxes was with visuals.
Two-thirds of study participants said they could do a reverse Google image search to find the original source of an image. About 70 percent of teens could correctly distinguish between an AI-generated image and a real photograph.
To test teens’ ability to spot misinformation, they were asked whether a social media photo of a melting traffic light was “strong evidence that hot temperatures in Texas melted traffic lights in July 2023.”
Most teens answered correctly, but about one-third still believed the photo alone was strong evidence that the claim about melting traffic lights was true.
Bowman said that the fact that there was no difference in students’ performance when results were analyzed by their age leaves her wondering if teens “of all ages have received the message that they can’t always believe their eyes when it comes to the images they see online.”
“Their radars seem to be up when it comes to identifying manipulated, misrepresented, or completely fabricated images,” Bowman continued. “Especially with the recent advancements and availability of generative AI technologies, I wonder if it may be harder to convince them of the authenticity of a photo that is actually real and verified than to convince them that an image is false in some way.”
When it came to sharing on social media, teens expressed a strong desire to make sure their posts contained correct information. So how are they fact-checking themselves, given a minority of teens actively follow news or have taken media literacy classes?
Among teens who said they verify news before sharing, Bowman said they’re engaged in lateral reading, which she described as “a quick internet search to investigate the post’s source” and a method employed by professional fact-checkers.
Given a random group of teens, Bowman posited they would most likely use much less effective ways of judging a source’s credibility, based on factors like a website’s design or URL.
“In other words, previous research shows that young people tend to rely on outdated techniques or surface-level criteria to determine a source’s credibility,” Bowman explained. “If schools across the country implemented high-quality news literacy instruction, I am confident we can debunk old notions of how to determine credibility that are no longer effective in today’s information landscape and, instead, teach young people research-backed verification techniques that we know work.”
Actively Staying Informed
While conspiracy theories surface commonly for teens, they’re not necessarily arming themselves with information to stave them off.
Teens are split on whether they trust the news. Just over half of teens said that journalists do more to protect society than to harm it. Nearly 70 percent said news organizations are biased, and 80 percent believe news organizations are either more biased or about the same as other online content creators.
A minority of teens — just 15 percent — actively seek out news to stay informed.
The study also asked teens to list news sources they trusted to provide accurate and fair information.
CNN and Fox News received the most endorsements, with 178 and 133 mentions respectively. TMZ, NPR and the Associated Press were equally matched with 12 mentions each.
Local TV news was the most trusted news medium, followed by TikTok.
Teens agree on at least one thing: A whopping 94 percent said schools should be required to offer some degree of media literacy.
“Young people know better than anyone how much they are expected to learn before graduation so, for so many teens to say they would welcome yet another requirement to their already overfull plate, is a huge deal and a big endorsement for the importance of a media literacy education,” Bowman said.
Throughout the study, students who had any amount of media literacy education did better on the study’s test questions than their peers. They were more likely to be active news seekers, trust news outlets and feel more confident in their ability to fact-check what they see online.
And, in a strange twist, students who get media literacy in school report seeing more conspiracy theories on social media — perhaps precisely because they have sharper media literacy skills.
“Teens with at least some media literacy instruction, who keep up with news, and who have high trust in news media are all more likely to report seeing conspiracy theory posts on social media at least once a week,” according to the report. “These differences could indicate that teens in these subgroups are more adept at spotting these kinds of posts or that their social media algorithms are more likely to serve them these kinds of posts, or both.”
What difference did $190 billion make for student success coming out of the COVID-19 health crisis?
Not as much as you might think.
An ESSER spending analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University found some puzzling instances where funneling more money into a pandemic-worsened problem didn’t help schools recover.
The data ultimately points to no “silver bullet” in spending aimed at improving students’ academic performance since the pandemic, says Marguerite Roza, director of Edunomics Lab.
Return on Investment
A crunch of the numbers found that states varied widely when it came to the return on investment of their ESSER dollars. Both reading and math scores increased in districts in states like Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee, where the rate of ESSER spending per student was relatively high (over $1,000) from 2022 to 2023.
States like Nevada, California and South Dakota were also high spenders, but they saw some of the lowest gains in reading and math during the same time period.
Analysts said the difference likely came down to leadership in some states being “simply more effective at steering districts to focus on student learning” in the face of vague spending guidelines from the federal government. Leaders in Mississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee focused on setting clear goals and checking progress for reading and math performance.
Each chart shows the ESSER funds each district spent per student during the 2022-23 school year compared to the average years of learning gains or losses in reading and math. Source: Edunomics Lab.
New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.
The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.
While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.
Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.
The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.
“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”
Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.
Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.
“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”
She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.
Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.
“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.
One of Shane Woods’ favorite memories as executive director of Girlstart, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls in the sciences, was as a participant taking her own goddaughter to the organization’s back-to-school extravaganza.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
They zipped through activities with rockets and robots, and Woods asked her goddaughter — named Sailor — what she thought of it all when they were heading home.
“She said, ‘I always liked science. Now I know I can do science,’” Woods recalls. “Unprompted — I didn't ask about careers. For her to have that connection lets us know that her perception is already there of, ‘I can do it.’”
The question for the adults who care about girls like Sailor, Woods says, then becomes: How do we sustain that interest?
That is one of the questions and challenges at the center of a recently released report based on the Girls’ Index, a survey of 17,500 girls in fifth through 12th grades that includes questions about their goals for the future and perception of science, technology, engineering and mathematics as potential careers.
While women are not just outpacing men in degrees — girls are doing better academically and completing high school on time more frequently than boys — the push for parity has been moving at a glacial pace in STEM. Though on the rise, women are still underrepresented in both degrees and employment in the sciences and technology.
Ruling Our Experiences — a nonprofit that studies the aspirations, behaviors and opinions of girls — compares results from the 2023 survey to those similarly gleaned in 2017.
Their researchers found that while girls who say they’re interested in STEM grew by 10 percentage points to 55 percent, compared to survey results five years prior, the number of girls who describe themselves as confident or smart enough to earn their dream job has plummeted.
“I want everybody who has a girl in their sphere of influence to be aware of this data, because I think that we all have a role in creating a generation of more confident, competent, and capable girls,” Lisa Hinkelman, founder and CEO of Ruling Our Experiences, says, “whether it's in the STEM arena, or in other spaces where girls’ voices and opinions are needed.”
High Interest, Lower Participation
Girls are interested in science and math. More than half of girls in every age group surveyed said they were considering a STEM career, according to the report, and overall interest is up by 10 percent since 2017 — something that holds steady among grade levels, income levels and ethnicities. Interest increased the most among the youngest girls, those in fifth and sixth grade, by 20 percent.
That doesn’t mean that girls are ready to dive into the field.
The report found a myriad of outside factors and social pressures that may be keeping girls from taking STEM classes or seeing themselves in science jobs.
The share of girls who say they are good at math and science fell sharply from 73 percent in 2017 to 59 percent in 2023, and that includes girls whose grades show they excel in those subjects.
“I think that should be especially concerning when we're thinking about the need to ensure that girls have increased representation in the STEM field, in that it's more than just exposing them to STEM opportunities,” Hinkelman says. “We also have to be simultaneously addressing these confidence challenges and their perceptions of their abilities that are simultaneously impacting what they might do next.”
Researchers also expressed concern that gender stereotypes and misconceptions about math and science could be deterring girls from taking those classes as they advance through school. About 28 percent of high school girls reported that they avoid classes with low female enrollment.
Overall, 56 percent of girls say they have felt excluded from an activity because of their gender, and the majority report feeling “pressured to fit into the specific stereotypes that are thought to be appropriate and expected for girls and women.” About the same amount said they avoided taking on leadership roles for fear of being seen as bossy.
In Girlstart’s work introducing girls in 24 school districts across three states to the world of STEM, which includes after-school programs, summer camps and an annual conference, Woods says that the organization strives to both provide role models and foster kinship. Girls already hear the message that there aren’t enough women in science and technology, she adds, and being the first or only girl in a science class isn’t necessarily attractive to them.
“Our girls like community, our girls like relationships, so what Girlstart does is provide that support network of peers who are like-minded,” Woods says. “You may be the only girl in your physics class at that high school, but hopefully through us you know of other girls in physics classes throughout the city, that you all have a network of support, that you are not doing this alone.”
STEM fields also have a messaging problem.
About 89 percent of girls said they want a career where they can help others, but they don’t necessarily see that happening in the sciences. Less than half of girls responded that they wanted both a service career and a STEM career.
“This gap may exist partly because of the stereotype that women are natural caregivers, steering girls towards traditional helping professions,” the report states. “However, STEM fields offer numerous ways to make a positive impact — from developing new medicines to solving environmental issues. By showing girls how STEM careers align with their desire to help, more diverse talent could be attracted to these fields.”
Crisis of Confidence
The data shows a troubling trend when it comes to how girls reported feeling about their abilities and potential.
The percentage of girls who consider themselves confident in 2023 dipped for nearly every grade level compared to 2017, with the largest drop among fifth and sixth graders. The share of girls who say they are not sure if they are smart enough for their dream career increased in every age group.
The confidence issues girls face extend beyond their perceptions of math and science. About 57 percent said they don’t feel cared for at school, and only 39 percent said they feel a sense of belonging at school.
Hinkelman says she was surprised by the particularly sharp drop in confidence reported by girls in fifth through seventh grades.
“I think girls are internalizing a lot of messages from the world that are telling them that they're not good enough, or they're not smart enough, or that there's certain kinds of jobs or careers that aren't really for them,” Hinkelman says. “For many girls, they have an overall low opinion of themselves and their opportunities and their abilities. I think we see that reflected when it comes to their perceptions of their abilities in STEM-specific areas as well.”
The education system on the whole needs to start building confidence in the sciences at the same time students are gaining competence in STEM subjects, she adds.
Woods says that in a digital world built on a system of “likes,” girls need environments where they know where they don’t have to be perfect so long as they are proud of what they’re doing.
The numbers support what Woods sees in her work. The study found that confident girls were 20 percent more likely than their peers to say they wanted a STEM career. The report found among girls who feel supported and accepted at school also showed more interest in STEM — 50 percent more than their peers.
Girls need to know “that they can take risks in that space, that it is safe to learn from one another, to fail in front of each other to get back up and take it as a lesson or a success,” Woods explains. “That is really what's critical in changing how girls see themselves in these careers and what they can do, so we have to reinforce that STEM will allow them to change the world.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Lewis Ferebee, chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools, stands at the top of a staircase at John Lewis Elementary when he’s approached by a couple of his constituents for handshakes. He has to reach down a bit — the third-grade boys only stand about waist-high to Ferebee.
The school got a face-lift three years ago. The renovations transformed the noisy, open-concept hallways — relics of the Open Education Movement from the ’60s and ’70s — into individual classrooms. Teachers can now talk to their students without the distracting din of chatter from other classrooms, but the garage doors that double as windows can be opened when teachers want to do activities that involve getting students from multiple classrooms working together.
The work that went into John Lewis Elementary highlights something unique about DC Public Schools. Since 2007, its Office of Public Education Facilities Modernization has kept and systematically worked through a schedule for upgrading schools. At the time, the district reportedly had a backlog of 20,000 work orders.
That level of overwhelm may sound familiar to educators at school districts nationwide who work in school buildings that are “in dire need of renovation,” as described in a recent brief from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.
The average age of school buildings is 49 years — just shy of the end of their lifespan — according to the brief, and more than half have “never undergone any major renovations” since they were built around the time of the Vietnam War.
The Biden administration has pumped a uniquely large amount of money into school infrastructure, according to experts who spoke with EdSurge, perhaps most well-known through ESSER funds in response to the pandemic. The issue of crumbling and outdated school buildings has generally been “orphaned” at the federal level, as one expert put it.
HOUSTON — On a Saturday morning in August 2023, a crowd gathered outside the Houston Independent School District administration building with protest signs in hand. The brutal, sticky heat of Texas summer already had people wiping sweat from their brows and handing out bottled water from ice-filled coolers.
Teachers, parents and politicians took turns at the microphone, united in their criticism of the controversial state takeover of Texas’ largest school district. One fear expressed was about how the mostly Black and Latino students at 28 schools would fare under a plan created by new Superintendent Mike Miles that would require school libraries to cease, in essence, functioning as libraries.
Demonstrators gather in August 2023 in protest of Houston ISD's plan to close libraries in schools. Photo by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.
Instead, they would become “team centers,” where teachers would send disruptive students to work independently. The most high-achieving students would be funneled there, too, where they could do worksheets at their own pace and free up teachers to focus on everyone else.
Taylor Hill, a student at Wheatley High School, would experience the change firsthand. Her school is located in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood and serves a student body that is nearly 100 percent classified as economically disadvantaged.
The Texas Education Agency awards letter grades to schools and districts based on test scores and other student performance metrics. When Wheatley High received a seventh “F” rating from the Texas Education Agency in 2019, it triggered the state takeover of the district. A Houston lawmaker championed the 2015 law that created the mandatory takeover process, something he saw as a way to hold the district accountable for continually low-performing schools.
At the protest, Hill stepped up to the podium and spoke into the microphone, talking over a crescendo of buzzing cicadas. The library at her school is a refuge, she said.
“I live in Fifth Ward. There's not a lot there, but what is there should not be turned into a detention center, especially when I am constantly there,” Hill told the crowd. “I read a lot, and I just feel like that is not what needs to happen.”
Unfortunately for Hill, the new state-appointed superintendent went through with his plan. A year later, the early consequences are becoming clear. School librarians have lost their jobs. Teachers have adopted a district-approved curriculum that some feel is rote and uninspiring. And children are receiving different educations depending on which part of the city they call home — a divide that maps onto Houston’s income and racial disparities.
Man With a Plan for ‘Differentiation’
Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in June 2023, brought in to lead the state takeover and improve academic performance in Houston.
In addition to districts, schools in Texas are individually given A through F grades based partially on standardized test scores. Miles quickly created big and controversial plans to improve scores. One strategy among his planned overhaul — called the New Education System, or NES — was to close libraries at 28 schools out of the district’s 274 total and turn them into “team centers.” It would accomplish two goals, he said: create a place to send “disruptive” students after removing them from class as well as an environment to send high-achieving students for enrichment.
School principals were also given the option to voluntarily adopt the new system, becoming what the district referred to as “NES-aligned.” After adding in those campuses, a total of 85 schools would start fall 2023 under the program.
The problem? Myriad parents and teachers alike hated the idea of closing down libraries and isolating students, especially considering these schools — and the entire school district — serves a student population that’s overwhelmingly Black and Latino.
The map below shows Houston schools that are part of the New Education System with each neighborhood color-coded based on median income. Click on the map to see more information about income in each neighborhood. Areas become more green as income increases and more blue as income decreases.
Map by Nadia Tamez-Robledo for EdSurge.
One was Melissa Yarborough, a teacher at Navarro Middle School in Houston’s East End, which is home to one of the city’s historically Latino neighborhoods. While not targeted as a failing school or assigned to the New Education System, her campus leaders adopted much of district's new curriculum, according to Yarborough. Navarro Middle officially became an NES school in 2024.
Her two children, however, were students at one of the targeted schools, Pugh Elementary in the city’s northeastern Denver Harbor neighborhood. Although, it wasn’t labeled as “failing” when Miles was appointed superintendent. It had an A rating from the state in 2022. Even by Houston ISD’s own calculations, the school is expected to earn a B rating when 2023 and 2024 school “report cards” are released. It was a tougher scoring formula released last year that makes earning high “grades” harder. A lawsuit by Texas school districts over the change has halted the release of 2023 ratings for now, and a second lawsuit is similarly blocking the state from releasing 2024 ratings.
As demonstrators hung back and talked after the protest, Yarborough said she was horrified by the way Miles described his plan to move disruptive students to the library-turned-team-center and tune into lessons via Zoom.
“He said, ‘Imagine. I'm walking in with 150 kids. All the children are working on their own little assignment or whatever, individually or in pairs,’” Yarborough recalled. “He said it to me like it's a beautiful thing.”
Screenshot of teacher and parent Melissa Yarborough speaking during the public comment portion of a board meeting in February. Video courtesy of Houston ISD.
She said Miles sold the idea as “differentiation,” a principle that all teachers learn during their undergraduate training. In essence, it’s the idea that teachers should adjust their lessons to each student’s needs, whether they’re struggling or grasping a concept quickly.
Yarborough said Miles’ plan isn’t effective differentiation, though. Disruptive students will receive a worse education, if the results of pandemic-era Zoom classes are any indicator, she said. And doing worksheets in the library isn’t a reward for high-achievers, she added.
Duncan Klussmann agreed with Yarborough’s assessment. A former superintendent of nearby Spring Branch Independent School District, he is now a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Houston. Ultimately, Klussmann said, Miles’ model is designed to produce higher test scores. But Klussmann is more interested to know what the student experience is in these schools.
“Just because you have higher state test schools, do more students go off to higher ed?” he asked. “Are they successful when they go off to higher ed? Do more students get a technical certification? Do more students go into the military, you know? Do they have a better life after high school? We don't know. We won't know for four, six, 10 years what the effect is of NES schools on students.”
Officials from Houston ISD did not respond to interview or information requests from EdSurge.
Displaced Librarians
When Brandie Dowda was hired at Burrus Elementary, a campus home to mostly Black and Hispanic students, she was the first librarian employed by the school in a decade.
Her tenure wouldn’t last long.
During summer 2023 — the same one during which Houstonians like student Hill and parent Yarborough protested outside the district administration building — Dowda was on vacation when the principal at Burrus informed her that the librarian position was being eliminated. The campus was going to be part of the inaugural New Education System cohort of schools, and the library would be closed.
Dowda found another librarian position in the district at Almeda Elementary and said she was happy at her new school. The library had long been central to life at the campus, and Dowda said students were rarely seen without a book in hand.
But again, her tenure would be short-lived.
Librarian Brandie Dowda poses in front of knitted protest signs before speaking at a board of managers meeting in August 2024. Photo courtesy of Dowda.
Dowda was leaving for work one morning in January 2024 and quickly scrolled through the news feed on her phone before heading out the door when she saw it — a news article announcing that 26 more schools would join the New Education System in the fall of 2024.
Dowda’s school was on the list. “I went, ‘Oh, I get to do this again,’” she recalled. “I found out from the regular news, which if I remember correctly, is also how my principal found out. It's kind of how everybody found out.”
Dowda said that her former library at Burrus wasn’t turned into a team center — a classroom was used instead — but students still weren’t allowed to access the books. Then, in May 2024 at Almeda, she was in the middle of a lesson when movers arrived to begin disassembling the library, she said. As the school year ended, the carpet was left with bald spots where shelves had been removed and the concrete floor underneath showed through. Her students were upset to learn that their library would be closed when they returned in the fall.
The library at Almeda Elementary after bookshelves were removed. Photo courtesy of Brandie Dowda.
Dowda’s story mirrors that of Cheryl Hensley, the former librarian at Lockhart Elementary. Hensley had been retired from her 38-year career in Houston ISD when a friend coaxed her into applying for the librarian position at the campus, which is in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of Third Ward.
Like Dowda at Almeda Elementary, she was at Lockhart for one year before her job was eliminated. Her principal opted into the NES standards believing that, in doing so, decisions about the school would still ultimately be made at the campus level. Hensley found out she lost her job in summer 2023.
“The principal is a super supporter of libraries and books and literature and reading, all over, I mean 100 percent,” Hensley said, “and so she was thinking I would be OK. They told [the principal] they could keep everybody, that everything would be the same and nothing would change.”
Cheryl Hensley poses in the library at Lockhart Elementary, where she was formerly a librarian and where she now volunteers monthly. She says that while the books have not been removed, they are not checked out to students. Photo courtesy of Hensley.
But then Hensley heard from the principal: “She called me in and just said, ‘No, I can't keep you. They told me that I have to turn my library into a team center.’”
Beyond the professional upheaval, Hensley and Dowda worry about what the absence of a school library will mean for students’ success in elementary school and beyond. Third grade is widely noted as a critical time for children to achieve reading proficiency, otherwise putting them at risk of falling behind academically during each subsequent year.
“I teach them to love to read,” Hensley said. “If you're invested so much in reading and math, then you're missing a major component [by closing libraries]. Because if a kid loves to read, they will read more. If a kid loves to read, he will comprehend more. We are part of that solution.”
Hensley said she visited her former colleagues and students at Lockhart monthly during the 2023-24 school year, and students asked her if she was back to reopen the library each time. It has been turned into a team center with about 50 desks, she says, where students are sent if they finish their classwork early.
Hensley said the school’s library, even if it’s not operating as one, still has books thanks to the principal’s actions in 2023. A work crew arrived to remove the shelves — making way for the team center desks — when the principal was at an off-campus meeting, Hensley recalled. The principal returned just in time to tell the crew that nothing was to be taken.
“She said, ‘We'll work that out, because you're not taking the books,’” Hensley says. “She pushed back, and I appreciate her 100 percent because still the library itself at Lockhart is basically intact.”
Houston ISD told Houston Landing that some schools allow students to informally check out books on an “honor system.”
The NES approach might fix the problem of low test scores, she said, “but it's not going to give you a lifetime learner or lifetime reader that will read and comprehend and think for themselves.”
While the district is moving forward with bringing more schools in its New Education System — and closing more libraries in the process — Dowda said that there aren’t any parents or community members she’s heard from who see library closures as a smart move.
“Why are you closing the libraries when you want to improve literacy and reading scores? They have not yet explained to us how that makes sense,” Dowda said. “I'm not the only one who has pointed out that this is not happening in the schools in the west side of Houston, which are the affluent schools that are mostly white. It is happening in the Title I schools with high poverty rates that are populated mostly by African American and Hispanic students.”
Dowda won’t be looking for yet another librarian job within Houston ISD. Instead, she found one in a different school district nearby. She predicts other educators who work at NES schools will do the same.
“I'm going to go to another district that values libraries,” she said, “and where I can have stability in a library and go about my librarian business of helping children find books that they enjoy reading.”
‘It’s Segregation’
It was last November that Yarborough, the Houston teacher and parent, stepped outside the bounds of the new NES curriculum for the final time.
After the summer protest, Yarborough started the 2023-24 school year using the district’s mandated materials. But three months in, she had had enough of watching students in her English language arts class mentally check out from the monotony of the new structure: She read off district-created slides, and then students answered a multiple-choice question by holding up a markerboard where they scribbled an A, B, C or D. For short-answer questions, they wrote on an index card. Over and over, until it was time for a five-question quiz.
Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, 'Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged.'
— Melissa Yarborough
“By November I was like, ‘I'm done with this,’” Yarborough recalls. “They're not learning. I know they can. I'm going to go back to a great lesson.”
For Native American Heritage Month, Yarborough decided to introduce her sixth graders to stories, poems and songs that fit the theme, despite them not being approved for use. Each time she rebelled by using a story or activity in class, even if an observing school administrator had liked the lesson, her supervisor would remind Yarborough the next day not to stray from the slides that were sent over by the district.
Eventually, an assistant principal called Yarborough into her office. She reminded Yarborough that the district’s orders barred teachers at NES-aligned schools like Navarro Middle from giving students quizzes, tests or any assessment outside of what was part of district-provided slideshows.
“It sounded kind of like a threat where she said, ‘I'm telling you before the [executive director] comes and tells you herself,’” Yarborough recalls. “‘You're going to be in big trouble with the ED herself if you don't start doing this now.’”
Yarborough quit her teaching job in January. She now works as a teacher in a nearby district, outside of the NES program. She couldn’t be part of a system that was forcing her to, as Yarborough puts it, treat students like machines.
“I knew they weren't learning. I knew I wasn't preparing them for anything in life besides a STAAR test,” Yarborough says, referencing the state’s annual standardized test, “and I was having to deny their humanity while we did that. I was so stressed, and my stomach was always a knot. I was like, ‘This is horrible. I can't keep doing this.’”
The slideshow model didn’t give her time to help students understand concepts before moving on, or for students to practice a skill on their own. The timed, jam-packed schedule didn’t even leave most kids with time to go to the bathroom, she says.
“They've just been holding up the whiteboard on the multiple-choice question slides, so they haven't been able to read a story and think through it and make mistakes and get feedback on their own,” Yarborough says. “So you have kids who will give up, and they just write any letter on their whiteboard, and it doesn't matter to them. And Mike Miles calls this engagement, but that's just obedience — because when a student is really engaged, it's their mind that's engaged, not their hand with a marker.”
Despite educators’ concerns, district leaders are riding high on data showing that some campuses made huge improvements in their overall accountability ratings — rising by 30 or more points, in some cases — during Miles’ first year at the helm. The district called the increases “remarkable” in a news release, noting the changes made under the New Education System.
While the state has been blocked from releasing annual school accountability scores, Houston ISD crunched the numbers itself and released its campuses’ preliminary scores. Wheatley High School, the source of low scores that triggered the state takeover, will increase from a “D” rating in 2023 to a “B” at the end of the 2024 academic year. The number of schools rated “A” and “B” will more than double during the same period, according to the district, while “D” and “F” campuses will fall to 41 schools in 2024 compared to 121 the previous year.
“We are incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in one year,” Miles said in the news release. “Together with our dedicated teachers, principals, and everyone at HISD, we will continue to provide high-quality instruction that builds on this growth.”
The first year of NES was turbulent, with a seemingly constant stream of new reforms. Protesters spoke out against the overhaul at public meetings, with plans for massive layoffs angering parents. Employee turnover during Miles’ tenure was 33 percent higher than the previous year.
Miles has remained cool under the barrage of criticism — including from a panel of graduating seniors who had firsthand experience under his New Education System. He brushed off the idea that a 9,000-student drop in enrollment was worrisome, telling the Houston Chronicle that the “numbers are changing every day ... but we feel confident that we’re going to keep growing in our enrollment until September.”
In the same article, a parent said her children had “hollow zombie faces” due to the stressful environment at their Houston ISD school. She opted to have them do virtual schooling this year.
As a parent, Yarborough wasn’t only troubled by how the superintendent’s test-centered plan changed school for the students she taught. Both of her children attended Pugh Elementary, part of the original cohort of NES schools, during the 2023-24 school year. She said her daughter’s fourth-grade class operated much like Yarborough was expected to run her sixth-grade class. Her son’s first-grade class wasn’t much different.
“My younger one would say, ‘Today's the same as every day,’” she recalls. “He said there wasn't the best part or the worst part. It wasn't good and it wasn't bad. It was just a flat line, like blah, every day.”
Yarborough found another school for her children — her son has specifically asked not to go back to Pugh Elementary for second grade. But to ensure she chose a school that’s beyond the reach of the New Education System, it meant looking at areas of the city that are wealthier.
“Miles is not going to target the schools where the parents have wealth and power, and that's concentrated in the schools with higher white populations,” Yarborough says. “And that's due to a legacy of racism.”
She feels bad about searching for schools based on the income level of their students’ families. But she doesn’t feel like she has a choice.
“Would Miles or any of those board members send their child to an NES school? They would say, ‘Oh, no. My kids need to be more challenged. My kids need a better social environment. My kids,’” Yarborough said. “They're giving our kids less. They're treating our kids differently. It's segregation.”
That’s how some experts say the current national conversation about youth mental health is framed — and counter to its goal, that lens is hurting the ability to find solutions that help adolescents better weather mental health struggles.
They spoke during a media briefing on youth mental health organized by the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit that studies how people think about social issues.
One of the biggest challenges to making communities that are overall better for youth mental health is the very way the issue is talked about, says Nat Kendall-Taylor, CEO of the FrameWorks Institute and a psychological anthropologist.
Conversations tend to focus on how individual choices students make can impact their mental health, he says, rather than on how systemic problems and the environments where teens live contribute to stress on adolescents. They also tend to be fatalistic and focus on the crisis nature of the problem, Kendall-Taylor adds, and paint teens as a kind of “other” social group that’s detached from their communities.
These factors form a “toxic trio” that causes people to feel as though the problem is insurmountable, he explains, and then tune out. That creates a challenge in getting people supportive of changes, and use of public resources, for teen mental health support.
“It’s become a culture war issue, it’s become an existential problem,” Kendall-Taylor says, “and the interesting thing is the way in which that crisis- and urgency-focused narrative really gives no space and has no room for solutions.”
What Motivates the Adolescent Brain?
Andrew Fuligni is a psychology professor and leads the Adolescent Development Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Science’s understanding of the adolescent brain is much different than it was 10 years ago, he says, and what the teen mind needs is connection, discovery and exploration. The motivation and rewards system is highly active, pumping out higher levels of dopamine than those seen in earlier childhood or in adulthood.
“It energizes our motivational region so we can explore the world and find not just how we can fit into the family but into the social world, community and so on,” Fuligni says. “We are designed to take risks during the adolescent years so we can learn. It’s important for adolescents to have those risks in safe and supportive ways, whether in school or the community, so they can find out how they can make a good contribution to the world around them.”
Fuligni says the public is still underestimating the importance of sleep, which is critical to the brain’s development, to adolescent mental health. Current evidence suggests there’s a far greater connection between quality sleep and mental health, he explains, than with another factor frequently named the root problem — social media usage.
“Many scientists believe that the focus on social media has led us to not pay attention to these other critical factors that may be driving these kinds of things,” Fuligni says.
But teens don’t necessarily control whether their environment is set up for a good night’s sleep, Fuligni says. How much noise or light pollution is present, or whether there’s tension at home, are all factors that can impact whether adolescents get sufficient rest.
“Sleep also shows very significant inequalities in American society,” he says. “When we look at economic inequalities, ethnic inequalities, sleep will follow every aspect of inequality across the nation. Light pollution, overcrowding, when you look at work schedules of parents, these will all drive poorer sleep within the household.”
Changing the Narrative
Kendall-Taylor says that one solution the FrameWork Institute recommends to address public disengagement around youth mental health is changing the framing from an individual problem to one that focuses on how our environment shapes us.
Educating people on how adolescent development works is key to getting buy-in for addressing issues that will improve teen well-being, he adds. There’s likewise a need to steer conversations around youth mental health from crisis to solutions, with more talking about what positive and resilient mental health experiences look like.
“We need to be careful that the young people in our stories are not passive recipients but active agents in the experiences of mental health,” Kendall-Taylor says, “that we don't fall into this ‘they need to be saved by us’ dynamic, which is a frequent trap that we fall into.”
View From a School District
Kent Pekel has spent a lot of time thinking about how stress on youth mental health gets in the way of students succeeding in class. As the superintendent in Rochester, Minnesota, he supported an overhaul of the district’s transportation system so that high school students could get more sleep with a school day start time of 8:50 a.m.
Before that change, the district tried its hand at convincing high schoolers to go to bed earlier by touting “the benefits of sleep.” The campaign didn’t land.
“The benefits of sleep were not resonating with high school kids,” Pekel says, “but recently as part of our mental health strategy, we’ve started to talk about wellness and being healthy.”
Pekel says he feels like he’s living through a second big paradigm shift in education. The first was the movement to implement early childhood education systemwide, rather than viewing it as a niche practice.
It was the framing around the importance of early childhood education, similar to what Kendall-Taylor describes for youth mental health, that helped it become more widely adopted, Pekel says. With mental health, he adds, the gap between what students need and what the education system can provide is even wider than what families faced at the onset of the early childhood education movement.
While it’s positive that students, parents and educators today are more aware of the importance of mental health, Pekel is also seeing more families that are willing to keep children home if they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety. Like others around the country, he says his district is managing a chronic absenteeism problem. Educators like him need help differentiating between when students are experiencing true mental health problems versus when they are simply going through the typical challenges that come with being a teen.
“Not being in school has catastrophic implications for your ability to learn, and we are seeing parents using terminology that implies it’s really rooted in a mental health challenge,” Pekel says, “and sometimes our school social workers, school counselors, school psychologists say, ‘No, this is just a kid who needs a lot of support to go to class.’”
There are plenty of changes teachers say could help them do their jobs better, such as adequate planning time and support for their well-being.
Louisiana’s Department of Education decided to tackle some of these challenges by bringing together a group of teachers to recommend solutions — and they’re seeing change take shape.
The Let Teachers Teach workgroup released its list of recommendations in May, and their ideas span improvements for dealing with issues including professional development, student discipline and what one of the state’s top education leaders calls “the art of teaching.”
“To me, teaching is a pedagogical science, but it requires an artistic delivery,” Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley says. “Unfortunately, many teachers — due to bureaucracies or inadequacies of leadership — feel as if they're more of a robot than a professional.”
The 18 recommendations don’t mince words when describing the problems teachers face. Its section on training eschews “redundant professional learning sessions” in favor of strategies like individually tailored teacher growth plans and more time for better collaboration and planning.
One of the recommendations on discipline is titled “Trust us — don’t blame us,” calling for “excessively disruptive” students to be removed from the classroom and for “ungovernable students” to be assigned to attend alternative schools. This kind of “exclusionary discipline” practice has its critics, who argue it can be counterproductive and that it unfairly targets students who are racial minorities. However, post-pandemic, some teachers are looking for new solutions as they’ve struggled to manage what they call worsened student behaviors.
Brumley says that four recommendations became laws during the state’s spring legislative session. They include a law requiring disruptive students to be removed from class at a teacher’s request and prohibiting retaliation against the teacher.
Others will ban cellphone use in schools starting in the fall and require extra pay for teachers’ “non-academic” work, which Brumley says might include activities like working the concession stand at a school football game.
The legislature also tasked the Louisiana Department of Education and State Board of Education with devising a more effective plan for state-mandated training, Brumley explains. The Let Teachers Teach recommendations described these trainings as something teachers do “outside of the normal school day and without compensation.”
Brumley says he wanted the working group to come up with “real-world solutions to make the profession stronger while keeping in mind that student outcomes have to be paramount.” The concept was to address problems that teachers consistently told him hindered their ability to do their job.
“A very clear example is I will hear teachers say, ‘My school forces me to read a script,’” Brumley says. “We were very clear around that particular concept in the recommendations: Unless it is explicit, direct instructions or it's a novice teacher or a struggling teacher, effective teachers need the autonomy to deliver the content through the art of the profession and not simply reading from a script.”
While Brumley and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry have come out in strong support of the recommendations — they led a news conference announcing the document’s release — that’s not to say the education landscape there is without conflict.
Low earning potential has some Louisiana teachers wondering how much longer they can stay in the field, and the governor declined to back permanent pay raises. It’s also a place where culture wars are playing out, which teachers say are a mental strain — the governor is suing the federal government over expanded Title IX guidelines that protect transgender students from discrimination.
It’s no secret that high school students are looking at the prospect of college more skeptically, and a large part of their hesitation comes from worry about taking on thousands of dollars in student loans.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
It’s only natural that they would experience sticker shock after researching the annual cost of attendance at universities that have caught their eye — which might be equivalent to a parent’s annual salary.
But should students count on having to scrape together that full amount?
Not likely, based on EdSurge’s number crunching.
Students generally don’t pay the full cost of attendance at public universities, according to federal data from College Scorecard. While the data only tracks students who receive federal financial aid — be it grants or loans — it shows that students typically get some level of discount even at the priciest public institutions and regardless of income level.
Across 1,800 public colleges and universities, the average full-price cost of attendance clocked in about $17,300 per year. Factoring in students’ grants and scholarships, it fell to a net average cost $10,200.
Yet seeing the gross cost of attendance can be intimidating for college-minded high schoolers and their families, particularly for those who are low-income or who aspire to be the first in their families to graduate with an advanced degree.
Before dismissing a college or university based on sticker price, students should use an institution’s net price calculator to see what they might be paying after financial aid, says Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
“Like with all things in postsecondary education, there's no one size fits all. Some schools would have lots of students that don't pay full price, and some schools would have most that do,” she explains. But the full cost of attendance is “not what most students pay. So don't be turned off by the sticker price. Odds are good that what you'll pay will be discounted to some degree.”
How Family Income Affects Tuition Prices
There were extremes on either side of the net price spectrum, with a handful of colleges reporting that students got money back on average thanks to receiving financial aid, while at others, students saw little difference between the pre- and post-financial aid price tags.
The University of California, Berkeley, is one of the country’s most expensive public universities, with an annual average cost of attendance slightly more than $41,000, according to federal data. That includes tuition, fees, books, other supplies and living expenses.
After grants and scholarships are applied, however, that figure falls to an average net price of about $17,400. Students in the lowest income bracket — with a family income of $30,000 or less — are left with an average net price of $9,200. While not exactly cheap, it’s roughly one-fifth of the original price tag. Students in the data’s highest financial bracket — with a family income of more than $110,000 — saw an average net price of $36,200.
This tracks with an analysis for the Brookings Institution, which found that family income is a better indicator than the full sticker price of what a student can expect to pay for tuition. Nonresident senior fellow Phillip Levine found that, between the 1995 and 2019 academic years, the share of college students who pay the full cost of attendance fell from 53 percent to 26 percent for those enrolled in state at public colleges. It fell from 29 percent to 16 percent for those enrolled at private, nonprofit colleges.
“The typical net price increases with income,” he states in the report. “Every additional dollar of income translates to around a 16-cent increase in net price.”
The net cost of a higher education has gone up for students at all income levels, he writes.
Given all of the variables that go into calculating how much need-based financial aid a student will get — not just how much parents earn, but factors like family size and the cost of the university — Desjean says price can be a barrier to students of any income level. However, lower-income families are typically looking at tougher choices when it comes to covering college expenses.
“I think low-income students are maybe disproportionately impacted, even with financial aid, just with having less discretionary income,” Desjean says. “A higher-income family might say, ‘We can't take a vacation this year.’ Whereas a low-income family may never take a vacation, so the things they’d be looking at giving up would be cutting their already tight grocery budget.”
First-generation or low-income students may also be less aware of financial aid that’s available to them, she says, while other students may have people in their lives who can give advice on and encourage them to explore all the aid options available.
Even families with similar incomes can have widely different expenses making demands on their budgets, Desjean adds, or have different mindsets about whether they can cut back to pay for college.
Organizations like the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators
are trying to dispel myths about financial aid, namely that it’s too difficult to apply for or that students shouldn’t apply if they assume they’re ineligible.
The U.S. Department of Education did itself no favors when its chaotic rollout of the new FAFSA system during the 2023-2024 school year hit technical snags that caused some students to miss out on money.
That’s a shame, Desjean says, because the new system did deliver on its promise to make applying for federal aid faster and easier — if students could use it.
“This year should have been the year we could really celebrate those changes and say, ‘Look, everyone, it's easy to apply for financial aid. Go ahead and do it,’” she says. “Unfortunately it kept with the old narrative, or it may have even amplified the old narrative. So I think the work we all need to be doing in the college access space is trying to remind students, ‘This year was not great, but there have been improvements to the FAFSA. Next year is going to be even better. Don't be intimidated.’”
A couple of years ago, as schools that had been forced to go virtual due to the coronavirus pandemic began to bring students back on campus, Pedro Olvera noticed that his phone started ringing more.
Olvera spent much of his career as a school psychologist in Santa Ana Unified School District, just a stone’s throw from Disneyland, where about 40 percent of students are English learners who speak Spanish.
He’s now a school psychology clinical manager at the staffing agency BlazerWorks, where he works with school districts to advise school psychologists in the district. That’s a task that’s getting harder for districts everywhere, he says, as the demand for student mental health support increases while the pipeline of qualified clinicians remains bottlenecked.
But the school districts that are reaching out to Olvera for help need an even rarer creature — bilingual school psychologists who can evaluate Spanish-speaking children for special education needs.
That’s because, leaders tell Olvera, schools that never needed this type of professional before are seeing an influx of English learners, in districts in states like Louisiana, Iowa and Colorado.
Beyond that, it’s inherently high stakes to determine whether a child needs special education services or more language support. Schools don’t want to misclassify a student with special needs as one who needs more help learning English, or for a child who simply needs support with English to be placed in special education.
Adding a language barrier between a child and school psychologist makes the evaluation more complex, Olvera says.
“It’s always been a challenge. Are learning difficulties due to differences, meaning due to language, or disorder?” Olvera says. “That’s always been a challenge, given that when you look at these nationwide scores, kids who are English learners tend to have these gaps in achievement.”
What Makes The Job Different?
While school psychologists have standard tests they can use to determine if a child needs special education services, Olvera says there’s a lot more to the process than one assessment. They need to know how language affects learning — or how trauma does, if the child is a refugee. The psychologist will also talk to a student’s parent about the child’s behavior at home.
“If we were to add another layer, it’s that cultural variable,” Olvera says. “Dealing with children that may be from Central America, South America, Asia, and understanding how that culture also comes into play with your assessments. What if there’s items on the assessment that are not familiar with the kid’s culture? How do you take account of that?”
Monica Oganes is a licensed school psychologist with 20 years in the field and has worked with the National Association of School Psychologists on trainings about evaluating multilingual learners for special needs.
She says the dearth of bilingual school psychologists has long been a problem, and it resurfaces each time the U.S. experiences an increase in immigration.
That’s why she’s a proponent of school psychologists, regardless of their own language abilities, getting trained to evaluate multilingual children. Even professionals who are bilingual in English and Spanish will face a language barrier if they are called to evaluate a child who speaks one of the hundreds of other languages spoken by families in the U.S.
Like Olvera, Oganes says there are simply more intricacies when it comes to evaluating an English learner for possible special needs. It starts with how the child arrived in the country.
“Basically all immigrant children have stress, but some have significant trauma because, in their home country, maybe they were exposed to traumatic events that caused them to leave their country,” Oganes explains, such as gang violence or the death of a parent. “Sometimes trauma creates behaviors. We’ve had children referred for autism evaluations, and when I got to evaluation, they’re severely traumatized by their situation. [That’s why] they’re not socializing.”
Immigrant children may have had fewer opportunities to attend school or come from countries where public education is lower quality than in the U.S., she adds.
“Not only are they learning in a second language, but their literacy may not be up to par, their math may not be up to par,” Oganes says. “If the quality of education is not up to par, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have a learning disability or a disability period.”
School psychologists working with multilingual learners have to be well-versed in how trauma affects brain development, she adds, namely in the hippocampus that regulates emotions and memory. But simply being bilingual and learning in multiple languages affects the brain, too.
“There are some languages that do not have plurals, so now they’re making errors in reading and writing,” Oganes offers as an example. “Does that have to do with orthography differences? Because your brain processes with your native language manifesting first, and the brain has to suppress the native language to produce the second language. That could take five to seven years from the time they enter the school.”
Something crucial was missing from classrooms over the past school year: millions of students who were part of the chronic absenteeism crisis that plagued districts large and small.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Could better communication between schools and parents alleviate the problem?
That’s the theory one nonprofit has. It partnered with Google for a massive, AI-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to find how parents and teachers are exchanging information.
The organization, called TalkingPoints, is betting that helping parents — especially those who are immigrants or are low-income — feel engaged with schools will increase both attendance and students’ academic performance.
Through its new analysis, TalkingPoints set out to find what educators and parents were most commonly talking about via messaging and the tone of those conversations. The messages analyzed were sent through the TalkingPoints app by administrators, teachers and parents over 15 months.
The results found that 44 percent of the messages were around logistics — things like school closures on snow days, says Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints founder and CEO. The next largest class of messages was what the report calls standard replies — responses like “thank you” or “have a good day” — at 34 percent.
Only 8 percent of messages were about academics, followed by homework at 5 percent.
To Lim, that means there’s a lot of room for improvement in how educators and parents are communicating. In an ideal world, she explains, most of those electronic conversations would center on learning.
“We know that research shows that there needs to be more conversations about student learning, behaviors, engagement,” Lim says. “All the other higher-quality conversation topics that we think should happen comes back to: there might be a lot of quantity [of] the conversations. But are they quality conversations? Not necessarily.”
Part of why Lim wants to change how educators and parents talk to each other is because TalkingPoints is turning its attention to how communication can potentially lower chronic absenteeism. The app’s use for that purpose is being piloted in 29 districts with a collective 89,000 students.
The hope is this creates a digital trail of an absent student so that the principal or other specialists can figure out the root cause for why they’re missing.
“We see ourselves as being in this really critical moment, where education inequities are rising,” says Laila Brenner, TalkingPoints’ head of philanthropy. “We have chronic absenteeism, we have decades of learning loss, and then we have this wave of advances in technology and AI that are giving us the potential to really scale, personalize and customize communications in a way that was never possible before. So how do we bring these two things together and really drive the impact?”
Past research that TalkingPoints undertook on its app use in a large urban school suggests that the approach can work, Lim says.
And other research has pointed to the importance of improving parent-teacher communication. For instance, a report from the Carnegie Corporation called engaging with immigrant families essential to students’ academic success.
“Given that students spend far more time at home and in the community than they do at school, building strong connections between diverse families and educators is essential to supporting student learning, especially as immigrants and children of immigrants are some of the fastest-growing populations in the country,” the report says.
What Does ‘Best Practices’ Mean?
One of TalkingPoints’ guiding principles is that opening up the lines of communication with parents — and what Lim calls “high-quality” communication that focuses on academics — ultimately benefits students. Those conversations should be centered on learning, generally keep a positive tone and start early in the year.
According to the analysis, only 31 percent of messages sent by educators and parents of secondary school students met those guidelines. At the elementary level, it was 19 percent.
The roots of the nonprofit were seeded when Lim was growing up in a London suburb, where her Korean immigrant mother worked hard to overcome the language barrier to ask teachers what she could do to support her daughter’s education. Other Korean parents who were likewise eager to help their children do well in class flocked to Lim’s mother to ask what teachers had said.
“My mom became like a parent spokesperson, interpreter, kind of a communications person for the school’s Korean parents, and that I think it really impacted my academic career trajectory and my sisters’ at the time,” Lim says.
It left an impression on Lim, how those parents separated from the school by language still sought ways to be involved.
“Later, I found out that family engagement truly has so much potential to drive and impact student outcomes — there's a ton of academic research that shows this,” Lim explains. “But the blueprint of how to do that well, in terms of best practices, doesn't quite exist, and families and schools face a lot of barriers in engaging and building relationships with each other in ways that can really support the student.”
In some cases, teachers may feel nervous or avoid interactions with parents, worried that it could be too time-consuming or contentious, Crystal Frommert, a middle school math teacher who wrote a book on the topic, told EdSurge in a podcast interview earlier this year.
What do parents want from schools when it comes to support for their children’s mental health?
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Mainly, it’s to feel safe.
That’s according to the most recent data from Action for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit that promotes physical and mental well-being for school-aged children. The report results come from a survey of about 1,000 parents with children in K-12 schools in December 2023.
Parents’ concerns about their kids’ mental health ranged from worries about stress — “The pressure that is put on kids to do well on tests is overwhelming sometimes,” one parent wrote — to fears about their children experiencing racism at school.
The goal of collecting data on parental views of mental health is to give them what they want, says Rob Bisceglie, the organization’s executive officer and president. According to the survey responses, that means training and tools on how to talk to their children about issues that affect their well-being. Action for Healthy Kids is using the survey data to develop guides for parents on topics like overall mental health, racism, body positivity, setting body boundaries and suicide prevention.
“Our program is what you call a family-school partnership model, and so what the family thinks — parents and caregivers — that's of particular importance and interest to us,” Bisceglie says.
Strong Support for Services
Parents who were surveyed by and large agreed that having a school where their child feels a sense of belonging is important to supporting students’ mental health. They also wanted mental health services to be available at school.
Nearly 70 percent of parents say their child has “at least one adult at school that they trust or talk to.” Another 88 percent of parents said a welcoming classroom environment would help their child in particular feel safe and supported. Nearly the same percentage wanted teachers to try their best to create positive relationships between students.
Despite recent politicization of K-12 schools, a majority of parents said they want schools to include lessons about topics including “respect, cooperation, perseverance, empathy.”
“I don't think this is surprising, but [the report] reinforced something for me, that what parents really want for their kids in schools is that their kids are safe and feel a sense of love and belonging,” Bisceglie says. “We would love that nurturing relationship to be with a parent or a primary caregiver. The second most likely person to provide that kind of nurturing support for a child is in the school, and that's why this is so important.”
Feeling ‘Fine’
The barrier to accessing mental health services that parents cited most often was their child feeling that nothing is wrong despite a parent feeling otherwise — 38 percent of parents said this was a problem.
Anais Murphy is senior manager of Action for Healthy Kids’ Youth Mental Health and Social and Emotional Learning Program. She says that while parents might worry that kids are saying they feel fine when they don’t, it’s also important for parents to know which behaviors are normal for each age group.
“I think part of the goal of this campaign is to provide parents with the information they need to understand what ‘fine’ means,” Murphy explains. “We're certainly not trying to over-diagnose or to bring alarm bells that are not appropriate, but we absolutely do want parents to have an understanding of, what are the typical markers of development and mental health? A 14-year-old is really irritable. That's totally appropriate and sometimes a cause for concern, but sometimes exactly where they're supposed to be.”
The numbers also point to the fact that parents are paying more attention to youth mental health, Murphy says, and the organization wants to help parents learn where they can go for more help.
“We're in a phase of the reduction of stigma — I'm talking about mental health — at least among the younger generation,” she says. “I think that's a big part of it. It’s not something necessarily that came through in terms of this survey, but certainly something that's [confirmed] in other research.”
Racism at School
In addition to mental health concerns, 58 parents of Black parents and 45 parents of Hispanic parents are worried about their child experiencing racism at school.
Bisceglie says it’s the third year the survey has asked parents about concerns over racism.
Murphy says one of the tools the organization is working on as a result of the survey is a guide for how parents can talk to their children about racism at home and how teachers can do the same at school.
“I think one of the things that happened around the pandemic time and George Floyd was we started talking about racism and institutions like schools a lot more,” she says. “Not that people were not experiencing that before, but we weren’t necessarily bringing attention to it. So it didn't really surprise me, because schools are privy to the same kind of institutional forces that all of our other institutions are, and structural racism and institutional racism are one of those. I think it's really important that it's raised the level of collective consciousness so that we can start talking about it.”
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